Is this the greatest year ever for animated films?

I’ve been spending the last two weeks watching at least one film a day, to “cram” for our upcoming voting for the San Francisco Film Critics Circle awards. Please don’t read that as a complaint. This part of my job definitely does not suck.

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“Fantastic Mr. Fox”: What will people say about this in 50 years?

During one of our many online discussions, where we make cases for our favorite films and performances, my respected colleague (and parent) Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustiblecelluloid.com suggested out loud what I had been thinking for a while — that this may be the greatest year for animated feature films of all time. One could make make a strong argument for 1937 with the seminal “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” 1940 with “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” or 1999 with “The Iron Giant,” “Toy Story 2” and “South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut.” But I know there hasn’t been a year filled with so many great animated films.

The SFFCC discussion comes after most of us have seen “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, which comes out this Friday. I liked it a lot. It’s very similar to the early 1990s “Beauty and the Beast”-era Disney films — funny and visually inventive with a New Orleans theme that’s explored in some interesting ways — without copying any played-out formulas. My favorite surprise: the lead character Tiana is sort of an anti-princess. She has a work ethic and desire for entrepreneurship that will please parents who don’t like the old princess ideal that marrying a rich privileged white guy should be every woman’s ultimate goal.

With that enthusiastic endorsement, “The Frog and the Princess” may be only my fifth-favorite animated film this year. We had another great CGI Pixar film with “Up”; a solid entry from arguably the greatest animator of all time — Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn “Ponyo”; and the wonderfully original stop-motion animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox” from Wes Anderson. And possibly rising above them all was Henry Selick’s “Coraline,” which beautifully blended old and new technologies and I think has the best chance of being treasured by future generations.

I’m probably most excited about the diversity of the tools that were used to create these pictures. A few years ago it looked as if we were destined for mostly second-rate CGI crap, with a Pixar film every year or two to remind us what we liked about the genre. This year proved that big studios are willing to make a financial commitment to hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, and get rewarded for taking the chance.

What was your favorite animated film this year? (Note I didn’t even mention “9,” “Monsters vs. Aliens,” “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “A Christmas Carol,” and some lesser-known independent and foreign films such as “A Town Called Panic.”) Do you think this year could go down as the best ever in the genre?

(Here’s a Wikipedia list of animated feature-length films by year, which unfortunately gets weighed down by titles like “”Bratz Fashion Pixzies” and “Chill Out, Scooby-Doo!”)

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.